Stewart Lee Vs The Man-Wulf (touring) ★★★★★

Five minutes of Stewart Lee makes me want to kill myself. Completely unfunny, dated, painful SHIT.

3rd rate comedian and politically correct maggot.

Boringly infantile.

Not The Recs’ opinion. Those are online comments that committed contrarian Stewart Lee has proudly displayed on his website as a badge of honour.

On the other hand, The Times called Lee “the most consistently stimulating stand-up comedian of the 21st century.” It’s a view that Lee happily accepts. “This is unprecedentedly acclaimed comedy,” he informs the audience. Then, eyeing the handful of empty seats, he adds, “though not so much to fill a room in Scarborough.”

An eternally dyspeptic comedy disruptor, Lee has a fine line in invective for latecomers, punters who give insufficient attention, and the seaside town’s voting record. (Scarborough currently has a Reform-led council.) Noting that there are no Black people in the audience, he snips, “Those flags worked a treat, didn’t they?”

If all this sounds like Stewart Lee doing Stewart Lee, Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf has rather more elaborate designs. Harking back to the beginning of his career 37 years ago, Lee recalls how the “alternative comedy” circuit was meant to lay waste to all forms of comedy that had come before. But he despairs that he’s no longer doing that. Much of the show’s premise is aimed squarely at the $60-million, right-wing comedians like Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle delivering monetisable hate, but, more broadly, at the rise of performative cruelty encouraged by the politics of Farage and Trump and reinforced by columnists in The Telegraph.

The show asks whether it is the material or the manner of its delivery that determines what we find funny, with Lee adopting three comic personae. “Like a Renaissance triptych,” he suggests with faux loftiness.

First comes the familiar “Stewart Lee”: ageing, liberal, culturally niche, and perpetually disappointed by the audience in front of him. Then comes The Man-Wulf, a snarling, swaggering American shock comic dragged from the darker recesses of Lee’s subconscious and unleashed upon that lucrative Netflix territory occupied by comedians who blithely punch down at the trans community or disabled people. The Man-Wulf is a monster, freed from any consequences for his actions. This section opens with a rap song whose lyrics include “I’m gonna make you sick / when you suck my dick” and continues in that coarse, puerile vein. The Man-Wulf’s repeated catchphrase of “Suck my dick, lick my balls and make me a sandwich” effectively skewers the empty aggression of such comics.

Finally, the two collide in a third iteration: progressive comedy delivered with the chest-beating confidence and blunt-force aggression of those Netflix comedians.

Beneath all the meta-comedy, cultural theory, and examination of where edgy stand-up ends and bullying demagoguery begins, Lee remains extraordinarily skilled at the rather old-fashioned business of making a room laugh. A rant about Colonel Tom’s family may not be all that topical, but it’s viciously funny. Laura Kuenssberg, Russell Brand, Gregg Wallace, and Michael McIntyre all get a deserved roasting.

But Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf reveals a willingness not to rest on the familiar or comfortable. Seeing one of our most cerebral stand-ups disappear inside an enormous werewolf costume offers a great visual that serves the show’s central theme. And the physical comedy of Lee, dressed as this hulking alpha-male monster, discovering that sitting on a stool has become an undertaking of almost Beckettian complexity feels fresh and unexpected.

What is truly impressive is that, even after 37 years of performing and despite his insistence that he is physically deteriorating, Lee retains a willingness to keep exploring. The Man-Wulf may have been summoned to destroy Stewart Lee. Instead, the beast provides further evidence that there is considerable life in the old dog yet.